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I've read most of the references you mentioned regarding evolution,
but I disagree with them on several levels.

The most compelling 'evidence' to dismiss evolutionat least
insofar as humans are concernedis that there is no evidence.

Yes, I know: You'll present Leakey's work as sufficient. But there
is still no evidence to support his contentions. Merely having a
collection of bones and a good story doesn't quite fill the bill for
me.

The strongest evidence which supports my side of the argument is
just this: Were Man to have had a common ancestor with the primates,
then they too would have all of the genetic material that man has.

If nature is the prime impetus to advance, then in order for an
advancement to take place it must facilitated by the ability to
advance, and that cannot take place without the necessary genetic
material being available beforehand.

You simply cannot get from 'A' to 'B' without the necessary genetic
codes.

So, if humans have that genetic material, they must have gotten that
from a precursor.

And yes, I've read the theory that it was 'cosmic ray' bombardment
on the human genome which cause the necessary mutations, but that is
pure bunk for this simple reason: Destruction of genetic material
does not produce a 'superior' result, if only that the destruction
is, well, destruction.

If anything it leads to an inferior result, and as much has been
proved in lab tests with ionizing radiation on various insects and
mice.

Might you say that all of the primates were bombarded and the
pre-humans weren't, thereby leading to the differentiation?

That would require some interesting theories!

And if the reverse were true, then the great apes would have
'evolved' into something else by this time.

Lastly, Darwin was from a very wealthy family, and it is not unknown
that he put for his theory as a subtle way of propagating the idea
that only the best, brightest, and most wealthy, should have rights
and access to political power. The rest of us were to be gradually
reduced to uneducated serfs to serve at their pleasure. He was an
avid follower of the political theories which Plato put forth in his
Republic.

If they's had the means to chemically neuter us at birth back then,
then likely neither of us would have having this conversation.

The funny thing here is this: Cro-Magnon appeared rather abruptly on
the scene. That in itself speaks to something rather phenomenal:
Instant evolution. Yet where is the 'missing link?' Quite frankly, I
think it won't be found for the simple fact that it never existed to
begin with.

If we're going to indulge our fantasies with regard to setting
government policy, permit me to advance one a bit less involved, and
yet still impossible to achieve.

Instead of April 15th being Tax Day for that shrinking number of
Americans who still file confessions with the IRS and their various
state governments, let Tax Day be the first Monday in November.

This would mean that in even-numbered years, Tax Day would fall the
day before Election Day for most federal and state offices.

I think that shifting Tax Day in that fashion would not only
increase voter participation in the affairs of our nation but also
send large numbers of wage-earning Americans into the voting booths
with steam spurting out'n their ears.

Rob and I have had this discussion in private, so it surprises me
that he's still spouting off.

First, I 'almost' agree with his argumentsexcept that he
continues to conflate violent/violence with aggressive/aggression.
Had he made the argument that humans are not inherently aggressive,
I'd be more willing to accept his views, but not inherently violent?
C'mon, Rob. We've talked about this already. Humans are built
for violencethis fact is clearly visible in their
forward-facing, depth-perceiving predator eyes and their omnivorous
teeth.

Yes, given plentiful meat supplies which fall dead at our feet, skin
sloughing off, organs falling out and meat self-cooking, whenever
our pheremones signal we're hungry, we humans are perfectly willing
to laze around and not use violence. But nature doesn't work that
way, does it? Nope. Even if it's just picking up a stick and
poking a termite hill to gather ants to the slaughter, we're
perfectly happy and eager to commit violence.

Now aggession? Yep, we tend to avoid it.

I realize that this doesn't sit well with your theories of
humanity's inate lotus-eating nature, but there's a nice bed of sand
for you to stick your head into when the pain of staring at
Inconvenient Truths becomes unbearable.

I'm sorry Sean thinks of any criticism of his article as "attacking
one of his fellow libertarians". It's not personal, Sean. I just
question the point you are making.

I'm not entirely averse to the notion of "picking one's battles".
For example, when I see someone on a forum advocating freedom
because it would mean he could indulge in donkey sex in the front
yard, alarm bells go off in my head. I'm thinking, "This guy is a
provocateur trying to scare people into not wanting freedom." Or at
least I think he is an idiot who doesn't know about picking one's
battles.

I just don't see why carrying guns outside town hall meetings is a
battle we shouldn't pick.

What's the difference in these two cases?

Well, hardly anyone is interested in donkey sex; and of those who
are, they probably have the decency to take it to the back yard, or
live among others who also think it is cool. In other words, it is
not a battle we have to fight. The world would not be filled with
complaints about donkey sex, if the world became free.

On the other hand, virtually everyone is concerned with defense, and
even the most gun-phobic person can see it's crazy to leave all
defense to police (these folks also take measures to reduce their
risk). It's simply not that outrageous to make the political
statement that there is a limit to how much gun control we will
put up with (which is what carrying guns in front of town meetings
clearly isa political statement), and that at some point we will
push back. And gun control is being beaten back across the country
not because we trimmed our actions to the opinions of newspaper
editors (tried that, didn't work), but because we have been very up
front about not being disarmed and about defending ourselves without
tolerating government interference in it.

I don't care that newspaper editors try to make hay with
this. "All publicity is good publicity," in a sense. I want
people, including gun haters, to think that gun owners cannot be
pushed around. I think it is precisely the message we should get
across.

A new law went into effect today (14 April 2010) in Mexico. If you
have a cell phone you must register with the government. The purpose
of this law is to end the custom of people using cell phones to call
in extortion threats. This appears to be a major racket South of the
Border, and surprise, government officials are involved. Apparently
30 million Mexicans are about to lose cell phone service for not
complying (tyrannical governments are so much more bearable when
they can be blown off with relative impunity and Mexicans are used
to this. The other side of the coin is how obnoxious and noxious an
effective tyranny can be.).

Mexico has strict gun control laws, for honest citizens. Its taxes
on electronics and other manufactured good are so high that until
recently smuggling these products into Mexico was more lucrative
than smuggling drugs out. After a while even the most genetically
inclined to submit to authority are forced to bend (if not break)
the tax laws to survive. Now you have to register your cell phone or
you won't get service (I wonder what the standard bribe will be to
get unregistered service?).

Now you know what we have to look forward to if we don't keep our
governments (state and local as well as federal) in line.

Over the last decade I have noticed something. There seems to be
less and less discussion of how the Imperial "bread and circuses "
policy helped destroy Rome. I hear fewer comments to the effect that
providing free food and entertainment spent the city broke. I hear
fewer comments about how corrupt politicians used these to maintain
public support as they robbed the City blind. I hear and read fewer
comments on how bread and circuses were used to distract people from
their loss of liberty.

I hear fewer comparisons between Roman bread and circuses and
Twentieth Century welfare states.

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And Richard Bartucci replied:

I think that the public displays in both Republican and Imperial
Rome were actually more a matter of wealthy patricians (particularly
those with political goals) flaunting their personal wealth to buy
favor with the plebs and "out-face" their rivals in the eyes of the
lesser patricians. Grain distributions to the city folk (plebs and
slaves alike) was undertaken, insofar as my memory can be relied
upon, on the governmental dime, brought in from outlying areas of
the Empire or from client states.

One of the reason why control of Egypt and the Mediterranean was
politically important. Though it's a basket case today, infested as
it is by Islamic fellahin, Egypt was very much the breadbasket of
the Roman Empire.

A city the size of metropolitan Rome in the period of the late
Republic and during the height of actual Imperial power simply had
to be fed by drawing upon areas outside the Italian peninsula.
Believe it or not, during this period Sicilytoday a barren,
poverty-stricken slice of hellwas largely one great mass of
factory farms structured in massive plantations called latifundia,
worked by slave labor and producing for the Roman market and the
other big cities to the north.

The difference between the Roman central government and ours today
was that way back then, the "public servants" largely plundered
people outside their jurisdictions, making war upon foreign states
for the fruits of conquest which enabled them to slop the hogs at
home.

I don't know if there's actually been any sort of recent de-emphasis
on popular accounts of the "bread-and-circuses" phenomenon since our
Marxist Messiah took over from Dubbya in 2009. It might seem so in
the wake of the popular fervor kindled by 2000's
Gladiator (which
was, most people failing to realize this notwithstanding,
essentially a re-make of a 1964 commercial failure cloak-and-sandal
superspectacular starring Sophia Loren, Stephen Boyd, and
Christopher Plummer, titled
The Fall of the Roman Empire), but I
figure it simply as the effect of a saturation and overload of
popular sensibility with regard to this period in history.

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To which A.X. Perez replied:

Actually I have seen this disremembering going on for quite awhile,
going back into the Nineties, in popular culture.

While dedicated liberty oriented economists (Mises and co.) may
continue to make comparisons, and while there is a lot of attention
given the Games nowadays and even corruption of Roman leaders, it is
amazing how no one wants to talk about the distribution of grain
(and other food stuff) to the poor that created the pretext/need to
expand Empire, kept the people being pushed off land to make rooms
for latifundia and/ or lost there jobs to the influx of slave labor
from rioting, and made people so dependent on the state that they
didn't dare rebel against the destruction of the Republic and
growing corruption and tyranny of their government.

It is not so amazing that people don't want to see the welfare
states we see worldwide, not just in US, compared to Rome's "bread
and circuses".

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Again Richar Bartucci replied:

Nobody else seems to be kicking in yet, and though I don't want this
to be just an exchange between Al and myself, there's much to be
said on the matter.

Strictly speaking, the growth of the plebeian population in the
metropolis that was Republican and later Imperial Rome seems to have
come about because of a redistribution of families from smallholding
farms in the campagnia (the Italian countryside).

Much of this appears to have happened as these yeomen farmers were
brought into military service for longer and longer periods, either
for defense (as in the early phases of the Second Punic War) or
conquest, and many were killed or crippled in the fighting.
Historian Victor Davis Hansen has extolled Republican Rome's "civic
militarism" in recounting the fact that the enormous losses
inflicted in battles like Trebbia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae were
quickly made up by newly-enlisting Roman citizens, but what seems to
escape notice is the fact that these long periods of service in the
legions and in the various auxiliary cohortseven when not marked
by such spectacular bloodlettingsdrew heavily upon the working
class that gave the Republic its fundamental economic strength.

As even programs on the History Channel have made clear, the few
"family farm" veterans who survived to return to their homes in
Italy after their long years of military service found that their
land had been taken over by politically connected patricians and
absorbed into the big factory farm systems of the latifundia or
simply turned into luxury "country estates" for the pleasure of the
super-rich.

This was one of the reasons why the legions tended to discharge
their veterans on the frontiers of the Republic and the Empire, with
a sort of "forty acres and a mule" system that not only established
colonies of loyal citizens upon lands stolen from the barbarians
(who had been living there, and had both proved and improved the
fields "inherited" by the ex-legionnaires) but also solved the
disgruntled ex-soldier problem. Stability in the newly conquered
territories and in Italy.

Those rural plebeians who could not be scattered into Iberia and
Gaul and Dacia wound up coming into Mater Roma to live as best they
could, and frequently that meant living on the dole. In a system
where one tended to grow up into the same occupation as one's father
had held, if your father did nothing except function as the client
of a wealthy patrician, that pretty much defined your own adult
life. And if your wealthy patrician got proscribed in one of the
political upsets that swept through the seven hills....

Well, generation after generation of plebeian poverty, stacked in
the tenement insulae and hungry for both food and distractions.
Little wonder that the Republic and the Empire had not a lot of
difficulty recruiting for the legions.

But the end effect was damaging, of course. It sustained a gradual
bleed-off of potential and actual talent in the Roman population
that had to induce the sort of civil decay which resulted in all the
vulnerabilities to which the Empire fell heir. Had the Roman
government been susceptible to the sort of rapid information flow
that came with the printing press, their system would've undergone
catastrophic changes far more swiftly than it did in historical
fact.

Military adventurism effectively propelled the Republic into it's
Imperial change, and the continuation of the Empire made inevitable
the fall of Roman civilization.

Makes reading L.Sprague de Camp's
Lest Darkness Fall
(expanded into a novel in 1941) and considering the exploits of
Martin Padway a helluva lot more interesting even today, doesn't it?

That's right, we've finally gotten the kinks worked out and it will
be available as a Kindle ebook on Friday, April 23rd through Amazon.

For pre-orders (starting Monday or Tuesday) through Saturday, April
24th (4/24/2010), the price will be $7.99 as a 'release day'
special. After that, the price goes to $9.99. We've specified no
DRM on the ebook and it's in the AZW format (akin to the Mobipocket
.Mobi/.PRC format) so any device that can read Kindle ebooks can
open this ebook. There will be free sample chapters as well, (the
first five chapters). We're also going to offer it through FiFo.com
in .ePub format the following week with the same price.

Following that release, we'll be offering a Trade Paperback (TPB)
version (6" x 9") through Amazon with a release date of May, 15th,
2010 (5/15/2010) for a price of $15.99.

Carl has also written numerous short stories for various online
newletters and we're in the process of gathering them together into
an anthology with the title "The Anarchists". This anthology will
be released through Amazon and FiFo on May 15th as well, with the
TPB version coming available through Amazon on June 1st. Same
prices apply.

Now that Carl has fully published his novel and anthology through
Near Space Press (that would be me), he hopes to finish the other
two stories in the "Net Assets" saga, starting with "Bargaining
Position". Please help inspire him to complete these other works by
buying "Net Assets" and "The Anarchists".

On that note, let me state that while Near Space Press is looking
for libertarian science fiction and fantasy works, I will also
consider libertarian works in other categories such as
Suspense/Thriller, Mystery, Alternative History, mainstream fiction
and even non-fiction works. If you've got a good story that's been
making the rounds of the major publishers and they keep rejecting it
because it doesn't fit their progressive belief system, toss a copy
my way. I prefer a zipped file containing a Word-formatted document
of the piece (Please, no wildly outrageous fonts and formatting, the
default Word settins work best.), a cover letter/inquiry and a good
synopsis of the workthis latter should be in the form of several
paragraphs discussing what happens in each chapter; one page worth
works best.

The Winter of 2009-2010 was one of the colder in a while. There were
more days with below average temperatures in my home town than ever,
for example (to give the anthropogenic global warming bunch their
due, they weren't as cold as other winters, just more of them).
There was snow on the mountain more days and it stayed there longer
than usual.

Next year will probably be worse. The two (not one, two) volcanic
eruptions in Iceland over this last month spewed ash and gas that
are grounding planes. Almost certainly enough will stay up to block
sunlight for a year or two leading to cooler winters in the northern
hemisphere and late and shortened growing seasons.

I keep saying that the AGWers are a hubristic bunch. The "runaway
global warming" they predict will by their own numbers raise world
temperatures to about the optimum warm weather enjoyed in the Middle
Ages. That's if they are not exaggerating the effects of human
release of green house gasses. At their worse predictions we are
well within temperature ranges in the Historic Era, nowhere near the
highs in other parts of the Cenozoic. At any time it is easily
overshadowed by the effects of tectonic activity and changes in
solar radiation. Yet they carry on like human activity can totally
change the Earth's climate, wipe out life on the planet, and
probably cause massive halitosis UNLESS SOMETHING IS DONE NOW,
usually something that will cost American citizens money, economic
opportunity and freedom.

It is more likely that while human release of greenhouse gasses has
some effect on climate it is less important than tectonic activity,
solar radiation, draining the Aral Sea and other factors combined.
It is just one more factor in this equation. While we should be
careful to avoid messing up our environment it is not worth the
price in liberty and economic opportunity those who already got
theirs are willing to impose on the rest of us.

It is hubris to put such a high value on human effect on the
environment. It is Lysenkoism to pretend that there are no other
factors and /or that they do not outweigh the effects of human
activity on the environment. And it is flat out tyranny to demand
that the common people give up their wealth and their chance to gain
wealth at the command of an elite who will continue to enjoy a
rather extravagant life style.